IT doesn't take long in this business to bring you back down to earth, and football has a knack of doing that in a very short period of time.

We found that to our cost when our two impressive opening performances were followed by disastrous defeats against Stafford and Merthyr over the holiday weekend.

On both Saturday and Monday we handed games on a plate to our opponents. When we have conceded the type of goals we have done, it knocks yards out of your own game and puts yards onto the opposition's.

We don't see the same sort of things happening at the other end. People have been tight and are not giving anything away, and we have had to work hard for whatever we have got.

Saturday wasn't the best in terms of preparation. I didn't get there until 3pm and other people were locked on the M42 and arrived between 2pm and 2.45pm.

We clawed our way back into the game twice, but as quickly as we did that, we have let them re-establish control very quickly. I saw individual mistakes for all four of their goals.

Merthyr base their game around set-pieces and that is how three of their four goals came about on Monday.

With everybody fit we have a very good squad, but what has happened is exactly what we didn't want to happen. In the first week of the season we were ravaged by injuries to key players.

On Monday Danny McDonnell, Ian Cottrill and Martin Weir weren't 100 per cent fit but we had to play them, and it has shown up the real picture.

Paul Carty (broken toe) and Ian Reed (hamstring) are likely to be out for a month, with Chris Greenman we are talking about the same period of time to be considered for the first team if everything goes well, and Micky Cotter could be looking at three to four weeks.

It is still a very delicate and tight situation financially and I knew it would be tight all through the summer.

Such is the delicacy that we are up to our limits on resources. But it is no good feeling sorry for yourselves in this situation. We have played four games, and we have done very well in two and done very poorly in the other two.

It is not a time to panic. You have to show concern at the performances that went with the results, but by the same token the management and dressing room weren't getting carried away with the results against Tamworth and Bath. Some sensible middle ground is required.

We now have another testing weekend coming up with games at Ilkeston on Saturday and at home to Clevedon on Monday.

Ilkeston will pose the same sort of problems that we faced at Merthyr, and we will have to deal with them better than we did on Monday.

They have had an up and down start similar to ours and we looked at them at Stafford on Monday.

Clevedon are another similar side -- a team that are also fairly direct in their approach.

John Barton was talking to TONY MOORE